Two decades after death of the Italian magnate Gianni Agnelli, the family war over his millionaire inheritance continues to generate news and controversy. The last battle ended with the temporary ‘triumph’ of Margherita Agnelli, the daughter of Gianni Agnelli and Marella Caracciolo, who has a long dispute in court with her three children: John, Lapo and Ginevra Elkann. A few days ago, the Turin Prosecutor’s Office ordered the preventive seizure of almost 75 million euros from Agnelli’s three grandchildren under the accusation of crimes of tax fraud and fraud against the State. Furthermore, Gianluca Ferrero, president of the Juventus football clubfamily property, and the Swiss notary Urs Robert von Grünigen They have also been affected by this precautionary measure.
This all-out war between mother and children keeps Italian public opinion on tenterhooks, seeing how the rain of millions from the strong man of FIAT has failed to bring happiness to his people. But What is the origin of the conflicts that have broken this aristocratic family?
© GETTY IMAGESTo understand this plot, worthy of a novel, we have to go back to January 24, 2003, the date on which, suffering from prostate cancer, the almighty Agnelli died, leaving a fortune valued at about 30,000 million euros. Although he was survived by his widow, the aristocrat and muse of Truman Capote, Princess Marella Caracciolo di Castagneto (who died in 2019), to whom he was married for half a century, and his daughter Margherita – his firstborn, Edoardocommitted suicide in 2000–; his grandson John Elkannmarried to Lavinia Borromeo, is the one who, chosen by his grandfather before he died, controls the family businesses.
As a sample of what is at stake, it should be noted that, only in 2023, he holding company Agnelli’s Exor achieved 16.8 billion euros of benefits. However, neither Margharita nor any of the five children she had with her second husband, the Russian nobleman Serge de Pahlen, are included in the distribution of these benefits.
In 2004, Margharita Agnelli, who always preferred to stay in the background, accepted a first settlement on the inheritance and accepted $1.3 billion. In those years, FIAT seemed to be on the verge of bankruptcy. However, the company was soon reorganized and Margaret found that this amount was “peccadillo” with everything that the family holding company generated and backed down. This was the beginning of the war.
© GETTY IMAGES“I’m very sad”
Margharita does not get tired and continues investigating to see where she can find a fissure that will destroy that first agreement of 2004 the one they called “Geneva Pacts”. Now she is not willing to back down and continues her way through the courts until she achieves her goal: for her and her five minor children to become part of the distribution of benefits. To do this, he has not hesitated to move Rome with Santiago to find alleged fiscal irregularities in the inheritance and achieve, in this way, that everything is reviewed again. “It’s very sad,” John Elkann recently declared. My mother reopened the inheritance issue immediately after the death from my grandfather, in an unexpected way.” Furthermore, in a long statement made public by his legal team the following accusatory words are read: “There is a mother who has been persecuting her parents and three of her children for more than twenty years.”
As in all disputes, another reading is presented, that of Margherita Agnelli and her lawyers, who were quick to respond to John Elkann’s words: “His desire is to guarantee fair treatment to all his children, in accordance with the law.”
For the moment, the Italian authorities, through the Turin prosecutor, Giovanni Bombardieri, have demonstrated “with a considerable amount of accounting and non-accounting and computer documentation” that the Elkanns could have incurred a crime of tax fraud since their grandmother, Marella Caracciolo, was able to spend her last years in Italy, at least since 2010, and not in Switzerland, so the distribution of the inheritance should not follow the guidelines of the Law of the Swiss country but the Italian ones.
Marella Caracciolo –born into a noble family that had reigned in Naples– she married at the age of 26, and dressed in nothing less than Balenciaga, with Gianni Agnelli, the heir of Fiat, but also the incarnation of Casanova (affairs with Anita Ekberg and Jackie Kennedy). In fact, the Swedish actress, protagonist of the legendary scene in the Trevi Fountain, in “Dolce Vita”, confessed many years later that her “only true love” had been Gianni Agnelli: “At first, no one believed in the relationship and his wife thought it was just another affair, but we were never able to leave each other.”. Anita Ekberg predeceased Marcella, in Rome, in 2015.
© GETTY IMAGESDespite all the rumors of infidelity, Gianni and Marcella remained close. They lived among luxuries and “glamour”, but they also suffered the harsh blows of life; especially, after the suicide of his son Edoardoat forty-six years old. The body of Edoardo, a man enslaved by his addictions and fears, who in recent years had converted to Islam, was found under a bridge on the outskirts of Turin. Edoardo lived his entire life with the sad feeling that his father did not trust him and that I would never trust him to move the family business forward.
For his part, Marella, Truman Capote’s last swan, died in February 2019, in Turin. Today, after the investigations initiated at the request of her daughter Margharita, the Italian authorities have quantified the amounts not declared by the aristocrat, or by her legal representatives, taking into account that she resided in Italy: it seems that 42.8 million euros for personal income tax evasionand 32 million for not paying inheritance and donation tax on a total of 800 million euros.
According to what the “Corriere della Sera” has published, the Elkann brothers knew what they were doing and the proof that the courts use is that when Marella published his book “I have cultivated my garden”the Agnellis’ legal team spoke to the publisher to introduce some pages showing how the matriarch lived in Switzerland.
Furthermore, everything indicates that in some important documents of the will the signatures of Marella Caracciolo, the widow of the “Avvocato”, could not be hers. And if any more element was still necessary in this bizarre story, the Italian authorities are investigating the existence of a heritage not declared until now. “The Finance Guard – read ‘Il Fatto Quotidiano’ – searched the house of the president of Stellantis on Thursday.” At the moment, there are five hundred million euros in accounts abroad whose origin is unknown.
Story of a stratospheric fortune… from a soap opera
In the television series “Succession”, this entire dispute that is taking place around Gianni Agnelli’s inheritance was analyzed from a “soap opera” point of view. And, from the outside, the plot seems created for an extraordinarily attractive family saga.
The origin of the Agnelli fortune dates back to the beginning of the 20th century, when the nascent automotive industry found its headquarters in Italian Piedmont. And there was a visionary, Giovanni Agnelli, grandfather of Gianni Agnelli. His father, Edoardo, had been a silkworm breeder and this activity had brought him enormous profits.
© GETTY IMAGESGiovannion July 1, 1899, founded the Italian Society for the Construction and Marketing of Automobiles in Turin. A week and a half later, the founding document of the Fabbrica Italianana Automobili Torino (FIAT) was ready and the rest is history. His son, Edoardo II, had seven children. If the oldest, Clara, married Prince Tassilo zu Fürstenbergmother of princes Egon and Ira von Fürstenberg; Gianni, the second, took the reins of the family business and was the director of FIAT from 1966 to 2003. His management was key to the internationalization of the firm.
For his part, John Elkann, his grandson, gave definitive support to the crisis of the family business and managed to relaunch the company. In fact, this is one of the arguments of John’s defense lawyers: that Margherita disengaged from the company when it seemed on the verge of bankruptcy and that, years later, when she saw how it has flourished at the hands of her son John, she wants to benefit “without having contributed anything.”
© GETTY IMAGESJohn, disenchanted by his mother’s behavior, last May revealed information about his childhood that does not leave her in a good light: “My brothers, Lapo and Ginevra, and I suffered physical and psychological violence from our mother since we were children.. This created a protective relationship on the part of our grandparents.” It should be remembered that the marriage of Margherita and John, Lapo and Ginevra’s father, the writer and journalist Alain Elkann, barely lasted five.
The Agnelli/Elkann family lives today broken into pieces. Twenty years after the death of the “Avvocato” his inheritance seems poisoned and Margherita’s anger has no end. Will a new pact be reached that will let Gianni Agnelli rest in peace? At the moment, the courts are ruling.
